RIPE Atlas 2012 Year in ReviewThe RIPE NCC is grateful to all members of the RIPE Atlas community for your participation and support. This includes RIPE Atlas users, probe hosts, sponsoring organisations, participants in the RIPE Atlas anchor pilot, and all RIPE NCC members who support this activity. In this end-of-year review we describe the major achievements and changes implemented in 2012 in RIPE Atlas.https://labs.ripe.net/Members/becha/ripe-atlas-2012-a-year-in-reviewhttps://labs.ripe.net/logo.png

RIPE Atlas 2012 Year in Review

The RIPE NCC is grateful to all members of the RIPE Atlas community for your participation and support. This includes RIPE Atlas users, probe hosts, sponsoring organisations, participants in the RIPE Atlas anchor pilot, and all RIPE NCC members who support this activity. In this end-of-year review we describe the major achievements and changes implemented in 2012 in RIPE Atlas.

Our goal is to create an opportunity for the unexpected and creative use of measurement data on Internet speed and performance, based on the world's biggest active measurement network. RIPE Atlas can be used by anyone, but a number of services are especially interesting and available to RIPE NCC members.

2012 was a very successful year for RIPE Atlas. We continued growing in terms of the number of distributed probes, users, and measurement results based on an ever-growing data collection network.

RIPE NCC Member Services

Out of the 5,500 RIPE Atlas users at the end of 2012, more than 1,500 are RIPE NCC members. In 2012 we developed a number of services and features specially targeted to the RIPE NCC membership. Maybe most interesting of these is a way to test the IPv6 reachability of your network from over 800 IPv6-enabled RIPE Atlas probes.

In September we announced the RIPE Atlas anchor pilot , which expands the infrastructure with a number of fixed measurement targets. Thank you to all the volunteers! We have now identified an initial 20 participants for the RIPE Atlas anchor pilot phase among the RIPE NCC membership, and we currently plan to make this a production service for RIPE NCC members in the spring of 2013.

In addition, we also implemented the following member-specific services:

Benefiting the Whole Internet Community

More measurement maps

We perform built-in measurements towards important targets in the Internet infrastructure - namely, the root name servers. Interactive maps based on these measurements are available to everyone, and the raw data is available to researchers upon request.

Currently, each map offers a view based on the combination of 14 targets and several other options, such as IPv4 or IPv6, TCP and/or UDP, anycast instances, or one of the six possible DNS lookup queries. That means you can visually compare various aspects of Internet connectivity and reachability in a variety of ways.

Figure2: All six RIPE Atlas maps on one screen

More probes and easier registration process

In the course of 2012, the number of active probes doubled and is now more than 2,220 . The number of probes we distributed is actually significantly higher, at nearly 3,400. On average, 15% of the probes are disconnected at any time, and another 10% are not yet or never seen (in transit on the way to their hosts, lost or damaged). In 2012, we increased efforts to distribute more probes - at training courses, conferences and via sponsors - as well as efforts to reach out to hosts with disconnected or lost probes. We also simplified the application and registration processes.

Looking up RIPE Atlas coverage in RIPEstat

If you are curious about how many probes are present in any given Autonomous System (AS) or IP prefix, or even a country, you can now find that information on RIPEstat in a number of formats:

The RIPE NCC is happy to give researchers access to the RIPE Atlas data if we believe the results of the research will benefit the Internet community. In 2012, the results of two such research projects were presented at RIPE 65 in Amsterdam. Please let us know if you are interested in our measurement data.

Benefits for Probe Hosts

At the end of the year we had more than 3,400 registered probe hosts, 600 outstanding requests for probes, and more than 5,500 registered RIPE Atlas users.

Figure 4: Increase in requests to host a RIPE Atlas probe (blue line)

Anyone can create a RIPE NCC Access account and become a RIPE Atlas user .

Anyone can host a probe by completing an online application form , and plugging in your probe once you receive it. Once the probe is activated, hosts start collecting credits, which they can redeem for customised, user-defined measurements that give them valuable information about their own network(s) using other probes across the entire RIPE Atlas network.

Four types of user-defined measurements

In 2012, we introduced customised measurements, and more than 5,000 of these user-defined measurements were performed. The following types are now available:

HTTP measurements are also technically possible, but we need more discussion with the community to agree on a usage policy, given that the goal of RIPE Atlas is not to measure services available on the network, but the underlying capabilities.

Promoting active and new hosts

In order to promote a sense of community among RIPE Atlas hosts, we now publish monthly top-ten lists that showcase active users with the longest probe uptime, the most measurements performed, as well as new probe hosts.

Sharing measurement results

If you mark the results of your user-defined measurements as "public", all other registered users can see them. If you want to share your results with someone else, you can use API keys .

RIPE Atlas Sponsors

We are grateful to our RIPE Atlas sponsors . In 2012 we had eight new and two returning sponsoring organisations.

Figure 5: Current RIPE Atlas sponsors

Get in touch

We look forward to hearing from you!

If you would like to give us your input or if you want to get in touch:

Please subscribe to the RIPE Atlas mailing list for active users, which is also followed and answered by developers: ripe-atlas [at] ripe [dot] net

The RIPE NCC uses cookies. Some of these cookies may have been set already. More information about our cookies can be found in our privacy policy. You can accept our cookies either by clicking here or by continuing to use the site.